AUGUST 1993.

Carol Bergé:

Strange lovely skin made like a "blister" you remember how it was that cupola of glass over the pilot of the old Messerschmitt if that's how you spell it she said to him. There was a flurry of feathers. Says on the carton KEEP FROZEN, and Product of U.S.A. What did that mean, was it about being thawed when the times were better. When the forms of what they called then marriage were so improved upon as to become creative of things other than children. You understand this was long after the idea of church or state protecting procreative process. Meaning a different kind of commitment: Closer my gods to thee or to the mature talents. A question of protection, this idea of the lovely strangeness of skin made like a glass cupola or what they called a "blister" as it was over the old pilots of the Luftwaffe in that war to end wars. That sacred space, or maybe the word was "secret" spaces, hard to tell when translating at this distance--that space where even in the heat of summer there would always be a breeze, constant and benign, across the hills from the east. Objects have their own individual fields of magnetism, he said to her, if I seen it once I seen it a thousand times, someone come into the shop, go for thinking about a thing, even touch it, don't matter if they buy it before they leave, if they don't, next person who come in walk right over to it, watch and see. And none that Kirlian aura stuff about it either. Spend the night in a sleeping bag they used to call them and see what I mean. Age of specialization is what it was, imagine that is what I'm asking of you. Before the whole new languages emerging like codes from the bellies of the children. That low, steady hum from the machines, always on even when turned off, even in the silence of winter there would always be that hum, constant and possibly malevolent, no way to tell yet, across the hills from the west.